The world of technology, project management and linguistic excellence operate in close harmony at RWS.

One of the most interesting ways we see this is in the work we are regularly asked to do on E-learning projects where modules need to be localised for staff training. The wide range of content we see on these projects makes this interesting work, with examples including corporate codes of conduct, staff environmental & sustainability training, insurance risk training and pharmaceutical cleaning and validation training.

The nature of our work in this area can be varied with a strong emphasis on being flexible. For some projects, we manage the complete workflow, including the localised software build and testing. For others, we need to work closely with a client’s team to make sure our part of the process (localisation of content, images, voice recording and animation) is delivered on time and integrates seamlessly with the overall project. In all of these projects, we manage the cultural adaptation of the content and advise on appropriate use of images, colour and necessary content adaptation for the relevant market.

One recent Japanese localisation project we worked on demonstrates this need to combine technical engineering, project management and linguistic skills to deliver an end-to-end service.

Initially developed in English using the Articulate Presenter authoring tool, our remit was to create a fully functional localised version that mirrored the original. Our teams worked together to deliver the various project stages and deliver a SCORM compliant build which our client was able to use. This project was successful because the team could bring together the technical engineering skills with excellent linguist services and manage the approval and version control stages to deliver a finished project on time.

However, some clients prefer to manage the software engineering aspects themselves and we also work on many projects as part of our client’s team. In these instances, we adapt their approach to work in the client’s LMS or CMS systems or work with extracted files.

Being able to work flexibly and having the technical competence to adapt our approach to different client requirements is certainly a key part of our localisation service and makes for very interesting projects.